Our Story
Forty-six years of field science, from nine expeditions in 1981 to twelve research centers on six continents.
Nine Expeditions
The School for Field Studies was founded in 1980 on a simple idea that still guides us. To understand and address environmental challenges, you must learn from and within the places where they unfold, and students can play a meaningful role in that work. From the beginning we have connected students directly to place, immersing them in ecosystems and communities where they learn from the environment and contribute to field research. They come away with the knowledge and experience to inspire environmental action.
SFS sent seventy-five students into the field in the summer of 1981, on nine expeditions. They counted wildlife in Kenya and dove the reefs off Little Cayman. In Iceland, one team studied the geology of a retreating glacier. Each expedition lasted three or four weeks. We kept the teams small, with six students to a leader, and a handful of scientists and a board of five ran the whole operation.
SFS ran eleven expeditions in 1982 and thirteen courses in 1983. That year we standardized our curriculum. We also started working with Northeastern University to accredit the courses, so the work students did in the field would count toward their degrees.
“This expedition allowed us to view Kenya’s wildlife and game management as a tourist never could. It allowed us to work alongside of the Game Department, not just to watch them in action.”Francesca McBride, Kenya, 1981
The Semester
We created our first semester programs in 1984. The first two ran for twelve weeks each in early 1985: wildlife biology in Kenya and marine biology on St. John in the Virgin Islands. We added a third in Alaska that summer. Students ended each semester with a full research project for a client who needed the answer. We called the course Directed Research, and every semester program still includes it.
SFS teams were already producing results. On Crete, a team recommended moving a crowded population of wild goats to an island with more forage. Officials moved the goats in the fall of 1983, and the next SFS team wrote the first vegetation inventory and management plan for that island. Students who camped on the grounds of the Vesuvius observatory studied the deposits of the 1944 eruption. They showed that avalanches had laid the deposits down. Scientists had credited them to explosive discharge, and the students corrected the record. On St. John, disease had killed almost every long-spined sea urchin on the reef. Students caged the survivors and proved that the animals shrink as well as grow.
We doubled our enrollment, from 210 students in 1984 to 421 in 1986. We gave financial aid to nearly half our students in 1984, and we opened scholarships to students from the countries where we worked and to high school students from the Bronx and Brooklyn.
“We think of science as a verb — an action word — not a noun.”SFS catalog, 1985
Permanent Ground
An expedition team gathered its data and went home. We began building permanent centers, where we could set long-term research goals around the needs of a region and each new group of students could add to the work of the last.
SFS established a permanent campus in Kenya in 1985 and another in the Virgin Islands in 1986. We opened the Australia center in 1987, in two rented houses near Millaa Millaa in far north Queensland that served as both living quarters and classrooms. Thirty-four students came that first year. The semester class presented its final research reports to an audience of nearly half the town. The students' research projects led Australia's national science agency to approach us. The agency offered the use of its computers and library, along with consulting time from its staff scientists, and we agreed to share our research results in return. In 1988 we bought 153 acres of rainforest beside World Heritage land and gave the property a local Yidinji name that means you are welcome here. By 1991 we ran five centers, and more than four thousand students had taken part in our programs.
SFS could now conduct studies that lasted for years. Over two years, students studied the queen conch in one bay and found that the population could not sustain itself. Their results supported the fishing moratorium the National Park Service set there in 1988. Students measured seagrass growth with and without boat anchoring, and the Park Service used the numbers to decide where boats could drop anchor. In Alaska, faculty and students wrote a report for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that called for a larger management zone to protect the bald eagles around Juneau. In the Adirondacks, students collected new data on how acid rain affects invertebrates, and New York's environmental agency requested their results. In 1988 we won a National Science Foundation grant that funded ten students to spend the following year turning their fieldwork into publishable science.
“Because rainforests don’t fit under a microscope and giraffes don’t browse in a test tube, SFS takes students to the best possible laboratories to study environmental issues.”SFS catalog, 1989–90
Depth
In 1994 SFS wrote down the test that every research project had to pass, and it came down to two questions: who cares, and so what? A project needed a client who was waiting for the answer.
That same year we hosted a conference at our South Caicos center. The Governor and several ministers attended, and the meeting produced the first conservation agenda the Turks and Caicos Islands ever had. Students assessed the territory's conch and lobster stocks, and the territory later wrote their assessments into its fishery rules. On Vancouver Island, a student team drew up the first ecoforestry plan for Barkley Sound, and the Huu-ay-aht First Nation adopted their woodlot plan for one reserve, holding off a clear-cut while keeping the land's value intact. In Costa Rica students took a municipality as their client and began monitoring its water supply, which no one had done before. Students and faculty then worked with the national forestry office on a management plan for the protected land near the center. In Australia students and faculty planted more than six thousand trees, and the earliest plantings were already twelve feet tall and working as windbreaks.
“Since SFS has been on South Caicos, high school grades on science exams have gone from last in the country to first.”James Mills, District Commissioner, South Caicos, 1993
We also narrowed our focus. We ended the summer courses we had run at satellite sites, and from then on we ran every program from a permanent center. Three resident faculty lived and taught at each one: an ecologist, a resource manager, and an economist. We defined our mission, formalized our curricula and research programs, and replicated our model across all centers. By the end of the decade we counted 8,500 alumni, and our courses earned credit at more than two hundred colleges.
The Work
For most of a decade we ran the model we had built. Term after term, students collected data at the centers and wrote up their research. SFS passed ten thousand alumni in 2000 and neared twelve thousand by 2004.
We also made our government partnerships formal. In Costa Rica, our center in Atenas had been presenting the students' Directed Research data to the environment ministry's local forestry official and helping the ministry develop reforestation programs. In 2003 we signed a cooperation agreement with that ministry, the first the ministry had granted any research organization. We signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kenya Wildlife Service the same year.
In March 2006 Cyclone Larry crossed the Queensland coast and flattened the Australia center's research plots overnight. Within days the students went back into the field. They set the old projects aside and built new baselines to measure how the forest recovered. One student's study of how rainforest trees survive a cyclone won an undergraduate research award from the Forum on Education Abroad the following year. Scientists in the region described our staff and students as “first responders” to the ecological changes the cyclone caused.
“We support each other which is the way things should work.”Forestry official, MINAE, Costa Rica
New Ground
In 2010 SFS began opening centers in new countries again. We opened one in Bhutan, in the Himalayas, and one in Tanzania, which we paired with Kenya for a two-country savanna semester. In 2012 we opened a center at Bocas del Toro in Panama with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. We added centers in Cambodia and Peru in 2014.
Students and faculty kept producing research that communities acted on. In Kimana, the SFS center joined a coalition of local organizations, and after three years of research the coalition enacted a water management plan for a Maasai community facing drought. On the Pacific coast of Baja, a fishing cooperative voted to create a marine reserve of more than a thousand hectares. We helped lead a three-year program to restore the reserve and trained the cooperative's members in underwater monitoring. In 2014 we made the University of Minnesota our school of record. By then we had more than sixteen thousand alumni.
“I surveyed Turks Islanders and tourists nationwide to improve the accuracy of seafood landings — research that yielded crucial though unexpected results for the TCI government and is the first SFS project to span an entire country.”Jenna Wiegand, Oregon State University, Turks and Caicos, 2013
Staying Power
In the fall of 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit South Caicos directly. We moved much of that term's cohort to our Panama center to finish the semester and closed the South Caicos center for two terms of repairs. The SFS community gave more than 22,000 dollars to help island residents recover. Alumni organized donation drives among their classmates, and one parent's school collected supplies for the island's classrooms. In January 2018 the center's staff delivered more than fifty boxes to the elementary school on South Caicos, and we reopened the center that June in renovated facilities. In 2019 we opened our Center for Climate Studies in Chilean Patagonia.
In March 2020 SFS suspended every program because of COVID-19. When Peru closed its borders on a day's notice, our staff kept teaching their students in a Cusco hotel until a U.S. Embassy flight took them home on March 25. Center staff stayed on. The Peru team looked after the center through the lockdown and raised money with a local relief group to send medicine to Iquitos, where the hospitals were overwhelmed. On South Caicos, eight staff members worked from the center and helped run the semester's courses online. The students came back in the fall of 2021, and a year later we had students at all ten of our centers.
“It doesn’t only take biologists to save the world; it takes passion and initiative — from all of us.”Marlowe Starling, University of Florida, Tanzania, Summer 2019
Twelve Countries
In 2024 we opened Croatia and Italy, our first European centers, and reached twelve centers on six continents. That fall, fifteen students in Croatia surveyed bottlenose dolphins from boats off Lošinj Island and helped fit satellite tags to sea turtles. In Italy, thirteen students studied nine farms in the Chianti Classico hills and presented their results to the mayor and farmers of Greve in Chianti. In Bhutan, three student teams studied the prayer flags strung across the country's mountainsides. Bhutan's forestry department had no hard data on the flags' impact and called their soil and water study essential.
In 2025 SFS ran 29 program offerings for 693 students from 156 colleges. Those students finished 166 Directed Research projects that year. One team in Costa Rica climbed into the canopy to set camera traps for the mammals living in the forests that protect the springs of Atenas. Students have now co-authored 77 papers in our research record, and we count more than 21,500 alumni.
Forty-six years in, we have remained guided by a consistent purpose: to connect rigorous education with meaningful field research, prepare students to approach environmental challenges thoughtfully and collaboratively, and contribute useful knowledge in the communities where we live and work. That commitment to learning, partnership, and reciprocity continues to shape our mission today. Join us and write your chapter in the SFS history.
Write the Next Chapter
Forty-six years after our founding, we run twelve centers on six continents. The story continues with you.